Jeff James Table of Contents

June and July By the Numbers

If you thought my last post in this series was belated, this one takes the cake!

I just barely stuck to my writing goals in June and July. I had more than one day where I seriously considered throwing in the towel and calling the whole thing off, but I still managed to soldier on (for the most part)

We went to Palm Springs in the middle of June, right after Amy's job ended. I gave myself permission to skip writing for those days since it was a vacation. I knew I'd have a hard time getting anything done after hanging out poolside all day, and I wasn't wrong.

I also gave myself the day off when we went to Santa Barbara in July for Amy's job interview at UCSB. I drove both ways, and our day in town on Saturday was pretty jam-packed. I was completely exhausted by the time we got home, so I definitely needed another day off.

However, I did finally miss a day of writing on July 24th. I was so exhausted that I didn't even have the energy to write a journal entry. I could have declared that the end of my writing streak, but when I thought about it, I realized that the most important thing was that I at least try to write every day.

If I reach the end of the year and I managed to write on all but a handful of days, I would still consider that a huge win. With that in mind, I decided to add a new rule to my daily goal to help me keep things going: if I miss a day, it doesn't count as long as I work on one of my projects the next day.

I can't count a journal entry or a blog post as my makeup writing, but if I write fiction, scripts pages or do some outlining, I'm good to go. That way I can still recover even if I miss a single day. If I miss two days in a row and it isn't a vacation, that's when I'll need to restart my writing streak.

In between journal entries, I did do a little bit of productive work these past two months. I spend a good amount of time brainstorming and outlining for an ongoing project. I also finally managed to resubmit my story at the end of July. I think I'm finally happy with the state of my story, so I don't plan on rewriting it if I end up submitting again.

I've made a lot of positive steps these last two months, but I still beat myself up when it feels like I've done nothing but write journal entries for weeks. Maybe I should try to do more writing exercises so that I won't have to resort to journal entries. The main issue is, as always, finding the time to write.

Final counts for June 2016:

18.5 hours of related work

0 script pages

74 words of fiction

4347 words of non-fiction

4421 total words

Final counts for July 2016:

17 hours of related work

0 script pages

378 words of fiction

4434 words of non-fiction

4812 total words

These were my goals for June:

Ideally I want to finish the outline for my current project, but we're already halfway through the month as I write this, so it might be a tall order.

I'd like to write a blog post for Full of Words that isn't another book review. It's been a while since I've written one of those.

Spend some time researching or brainstorming for Hops Arcana.

Here's how those goals played out:

I'm really damn close on this. I just need one more brainstorming session and then I should be able to knock out the final part of the outline.

I did write two book reviews in July, but I didn't manage to write anything else for Full of Words. Maybe this month?

I haven't looked at Hops Arcana since my screenwriting class ended.

Here are my goals for August:

Have one final brainstorming session for my ongoing project, then finish my outline and start writing. Ideally, finish a first draft by the end of August.